Every ex-president has opportunities to make money, but “none have so flagrantly circumvented laws and ethical norms as have Bill and Hillary Clinton,” writes Victor Davis Hanson at National Review. The pair’s wealth “is truly staggering, and to a great extent accrued from non-transparent pay-for-play aggrandizement.” Indeed, “as lifelong public officials with generous pensions and paid expenses, they nevertheless labored so hard to accumulate millions in ways that sometimes bothered even friends and supporters.” But by adopting a left-wing agenda, they “had unprecedented opportunities to shoulder-rub with liberal financial titans without suffering the class invective reserved for the Koch brothers or Sheldon Adelson.”

Terrorist Watch: For ISIS, Everyone is a Target

The murder of 84-year-old Fr. Jacques Hamel — his throat slit as he was forced to kneel at the altar — was shocking, even after all France has endured at the hands of Islamist terrorists over the past 18 months, writes Douglas Murray for The Gatestone Institute. But unlike the Charlie Hebdo massacre, there was no “provocation” to serve as a possible excuse. “An enemy willing to slaughter the most rollicking secularists and the most devout priest, both in their places of work,” he writes, “is an enemy — extremist Islam — clearly intent not on some kind of tributary offering or suit for peace, but rather an enemy which seeks its opponents’ total and utter destruction,” no matter who they are.

From the right: Bill’s Magic Has Lost Its Touch

At the 2012 Democratic convention, recalls Jonathan V. Last in The Weekly Standard, Bill Clinton gave one of the all-time great political performances. In fact, it was mostly responsible for President Obama’s post-convention bounce: “He was that good.” No so Clinton’s Tuesday night paean to his wife. Clinton might “have been more persuasive had he tried to explain a single one of the charges against his wife — on Benghazi, on her flip-flopping on trade, on the mishandling of her private email server.” But he didn’t, Last says, because he couldn’t: “Hillary Clinton is such a complicated figure and such a deeply-flawed candidate, that even Bill Clinton could only do so much for her.”

Mideast forecast: A Bibi-Obama Pre-Election Deal?

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may be moving to hedge his bets and make an aid deal with Obama rather than wait for the election outcome, writes Jonathan S. Tobin at Commentary. Washington is offering a $40 billion package, a one-third increase over current aid. That’s a lucrative inducement, he suggests, but there are also politically pragmatic reasons for Bibi to move now: “A Clinton administration will be heavily indebted to Bernie Sanders and his left-wing supporters, who are, if anything, more hostile to Israel than Obama,” he writes. But “while Trump is quick to proclaim his friendship for Israel, he is hostile to foreign aid in principle.” In other words, “the devil he knows may be a better bet for a vital aid package than the uncertainties associated with Obama’s successors.”

Feminist perspective: What Bill Didn’t Say

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wasn’t all that impressed with Bill Clinton’s speech, either — not to mention the “byzantine” dynamics of the Clintons’ marriage, which she defines as: “One of them creates chaos — usually Bill — and then they get out of it together.” As for the speech, it was a case of “one of the most liked presidents [being] charged with humanizing one of the least liked presidential candidates.” Yet “in trying to feminize and maternalize Hillary,” she writes, “Bill almost went overboard about ‘that girl,’ as he called her three times.” Left unmentioned was how “ ‘that girl” put up with the humiliations of Bill’s hound-dog ways with ‘that woman’ and others, and let him hide behind her skirt.”